


Lucky

by allusionaries



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Humanstuck, Minor Injuries, TW: Mentions of domestic abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-21
Updated: 2015-01-21
Packaged: 2018-03-08 12:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3208592
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allusionaries/pseuds/allusionaries
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat Vantas, university sophomore, thought he was the most unlucky guy on campus. After six hours in an Emergency Room, the last thing he expected was for the tides to turn. It just so happens, he might be pretty damn lucky after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lucky

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are perhaps the biggest fucking moron on the entirety of your university’s campus. No, scratch that. You are the most absolutely asinine piece of shit to have ever walked this Earth alone, and you can prove it, by the icepacks that covered your ankle and the way you were stuck sitting on a gurney in the fucking E.R. not even two weeks into the semester. 

You couldn’t even complain, really, because they had warned you about those stairs, bro. And by ‘they’ you mean your pack of raving, lunatic acquaintances you sometimes refer to, very loosely, as friends. Sure, being nineteen years old, you were all plenty mature enough to know you shouldn’t be playing Zombies vs. Humans in the dorm-building you all happened to share. But, that didn’t stop you from doing it anyway. Apparently, it also didn’t stop you from tumbling face-first down a flight of stairs connecting the third and fourth floor and, according to the paramedics, trashing your fucking ankle. 

And, of course, with your luck the emergency room sucks. They’re under-staffed and over-filled, with barely enough supplies to go around. You got here at around ten-thirty at night and it was currently one-thirty in the morning and you still hadn’t been taken to get x-rays yet, even though you had managed to fill out the insurance forms and call your dad literally hours ago. You can hear babies screeching down the hall, hidden by the PEDIATRICS E.R. door, and hear the coughing, complaining, shuffling, moaning, and spewing of every other adult patient. Injuries ranged from being absolutely wrecked with viruses and sicknesses to worriedly forcing gauze onto various bleeding body parts, looking a little paler than they had when they wandered in fifteen minutes ago; but hey, whatever, not your business or anything. You’re just the schmuck here stuck with a broken ankle.

You’re also, surprisingly, the only one of your age group, as far as you can tell. People here seem to be ranging from their late thirties to early seventies, as far as you can tell. And that’s disregarding the infants you can hear absolutely shrieking like goddamn banshees down the hall and two doors down. Well, that is, until you turn to face the other end of the hallway – you think the waiting room entrance is that way, but the signs are scratched and worn and you’re sort of trapped in a two-way hallway lined with closed private room doors, leading down to the empty nurses station – and notice they were currently wheeling in a girl around your age on another gurney, fresh from the ambulance. As she is wheeled down the hallway by an over-tired, underpaid nurse, you can see she has her wrist splinted and several ugly cuts and bloody spots that probably have a complicated medical term across her face, like a split lip and crusted blood around her nostrils and upper lip. She’s got a nasty black eye, too. Whoever hit her had one hell of a hook.  
But underneath all that blood and gore, she didn’t look… half bad, actually. Red hair, freckles, pale skin... you thought you saw blue eyes, but were too busy trying to catalogue her injuries and how they possibly came about to focus on any true physical characteristic for too long. She wore a pair of jeans and a Wal-Mart-grade dragon tee-shirt, ripped and stretched out, presumably from being grabbed and manhandled. Her hair wasn’t long, per say, but it definitely was not a pixie cut, reaching her shoulders, just about. It looked uncombed ravaged. 

She was oh-so-conveniently parked; it seemed, for your companionship. The nurse wheeled her gurney over to the side of the hallway opposite you, leaving space in the middle and facing her so that she was turned the way she came and, coincidentally, you.  
“Please stay here and wait until the next available doctor can see you.” The nurse sighed, looking over the girl as if she were performing a play done a thousand too many times, repeating her script in a monotone voice before ambling away and out of sight before you could ask when you would get your fucking x-rays and go home.  
You snort when you hear the girl repeat the nurse’s words under her breath in a higher-pitched, mocking voice, moving to cross her arms over her chest but thinking better of it last minute and avoiding moving the splinted wrist. You know how that feels. “It’s bullshit.” You call to her, because you two are comrades now, brothers in war and at the mercy of your enemies; “I’ve been here three hours and I’ve spoken to someone once. And that was to get my money.”  
Now, it’s your turn to hear her snort, leaning back against the propped-up backboard of the gurney and resting her shoulders with a sigh; “Figures. As if my tuition and taxes go to this bullshit.”

There was something about her voice you liked, but you couldn’t exactly… place it. It was higher in pitch, sure, and maybe a little raspy or nasal-y, but not unpleasant. It was sort of… wild sounding, in a way. As if her pitches and tones didn’t follow the laws of normal vocal chord dynamics and instead paved their own way. You could respect that. Stick it to the man. Not like you weren’t used to weird voices, when Eridan spoke with the most ridiculous accent ever and Sollux’s lisp was so bad you’d debated hiring a personal translator. You’ve got no room to judge, and you know that damn well. 

You both grow silent within minutes, and it’s both awkward and relieving. Relieving because you suck at communicating with people who don’t understand your morbid sarcasm and your intense outbursts of anger and screaming, and awkward because you do want to talk to her, for whatever reason. Her injuries are certainly enough to have your curiosity piqued, and the fact that she’s the only other person your age around here makes you feel as if the two of you have some sort of bond, thanks to the cosmos, or whatever. Only a handful of times are the two of you interrupted in your stewing, mostly by rushing nurses who assured you it would “Only be a few more minutes, hun!” Few more minutes your ass. You were told the same thing hours ago the last time you managed to slow someone down enough to get a word in edge-wise. 

Eventually, she is the one to break the silence, heaving a sigh that shakes her chest (not that you looked), and shaking her head slowly. “So…” she begins, obviously trying to find her footing on loose ground, here. You respect her for that. Being… communicative, the word probably is, you think. “…What are you in for, and how long have you served?” 

It takes you a minute to understand that she does, in fact, know you’re both not in jail and in fact just trapped in a very shitty E.R. Oh. Those were jokes. You crack a lopsided smile at that and now it’s your turn to sigh, offering her a fluid shrug before responding. “Broken ankle, and, like… six hours. I got here at around 10:30.” You admit, tacking on a somewhat hasty “And you?” at the end, because you almost forgot your manners, there. 

“I got into a death-match with my girlfriend. Or, uh, ex-girlfriend, I guess.” Her words come smooth and nonchalant, admitting to a complete stranger her homosexuality and domestic abuse, all in a single breath. This girl had some serious cajones, if you said so yourself. “But you should see how she looks.” She pipes up, just as you’re about to respond, flashing you a wicked, sharp-toothed grin from behind… are those glasses red? How did you not notice that before? 

“…Oh.” Was all you could stutter, dumbly, like a fish pulled onto the riverbank, a weak flop of an answer. Mostly because you had no idea what was appropriate to say in such a situation. Do you offer condolences? Laugh along to her grin? Part of him wanted to know what the fuck must’ve happened to the other girl, if he hadn’t even seen her wheeled into the E.R. Sure, they’d keep them separate, but was this girl so maimed they wheeled her right into the O.R., or something? Holy shit. 

Before you could continue your rambling stream-of-conscious, she cleared her throat, demanding your undivided attention before pointing to your ankle with her good hand and forefinger; “I said-“ she emphasized; “How did you fuck up your ankle?”  
At that, you can feel heat rise to your cheeks. While you’ve got Hulk Hogan sitting across the hallway from you, brandishing trophies of a fight well won, here you were with your pathetic, accidentally-self-inflicted ankle. How do you admit something as humiliating as that? If he answered anything spectacular from the truth, now, considering how long it took him to answer, she would definitely see through a lie. So he was forced to swallow his pride and cross his arms over his chest, leaning back onto the backboard of the gurney before responding;  
“I fell down the stairs of my dorm-building while chasing a friend and fucking face-planted like an asshole.”

Before the sentence even leaves your lips, she’s cackling. It sounded like a hyena being strangled, but for some reason it’s contagious. Upon later occasions, you’d blame it on the fact you’d been sitting in an E.R. for hours, high on adrenaline from your injury, and it was early in the pre-sunrise morning. In reality, you know it was because you knew the reason of your injury was fucking ridiculous, and because her laugh was a fucking spectacle.  
“Smooth moves.” She shook her head with the dying echoes of her laughter, falling into a more comfortable silence than the one we shared earlier. Eventually, I decide that it’s my turn to speak up and take one for the team, so I clear my throat and begin when she looks at me, brow quirked. 

“So, uh… what university do you go to?” I fiddle with the hem of my shirt, because hey, that’s a normal question, right? Not too weird to ask the only other nineteen year old where they went to school, especially after mentioning how they paid tuition and it specifically was not for the bullshit that was this E.R.  
“Prospit Uni.” She answers; “And considering it’s the only university in this stupid fucking town… I’m assuming that we’re technically class-mates.” And there she goes, flashing another smirk in your direction. This time, you return it, although probably not quite as smoothly as she does.  
“Yeah, you assumed right. Surprised I haven’t seen you around until now, but…” and with that you trail off with a somewhat nervous chuckle, which she returns, more confidently than you. Again, you fall into a silence, lulled into a sense of comfort by the distant beeping of various machines and the occasional cry of a PEDIATRICS E.R. baby. 

Oh, fuck. You really are an idiot. You’ve been talking to her for the past, like… forty-five minutes and haven’t even mentioned your name. But then again, neither did she, so maybe you’re both sort of dumb. Or just tired and worn out from being stuck in the E.R. all night with no advancements being made for your physical well-beings. “I’m Karkat, by the way. Karkat Vantas.” You offer from across the hall, and she turns to face you and offers you a smaller grin with less teeth, but still enough white to be vaguely unsettling before responding with; “Terezi Pyrope at your service.” 

The two of you talk for a while, and it’s nice. You find out she’s from a town not too far from your hometown, and has a sister, and her mom’s a lawyer – that also happens to be what her major is. You share with her some stories of you and your friends fucking things up and being general nuisances around campus. She tells you a little bit about her recent ex-girlfriend, apparently named Vriska, and how they got into a fight and things just escalated and it’d been going downhill for a while. You try to offer polite condolences, but she shuts you up with a dismissive hand wave and asks you for another spiel, stick it you big oof. The friendship (if it can even be called that) that the two of you forge is based mostly off of a similar interest in other people’s pain and throwing shade, which you don’t really mind at all, actually. The only other friend of yours who particularly enjoys gossip and busy-body talk is Eridan, whom you could only stand for specific amounts of time during very specific intervals, for obvious reasons. It’s nice to share campus gossip with a new face. 

Unfortunately, a nurse whom comes to wheel your gurney, mumbling something about x-rays and a cast, interrupts the peanut gallery. Before she can grab you and wheel you away, though, Terezi asks her to hail you over. Maybe out of pity or out of curiosity, the woman does as requested, and Terezi whips out a pen from her jeans pocket – you hadn’t noticed that they’re positively lumpy with what you could assume were just a variety of collected junk. She yanks your arm across the railing, flipping it so the soft underside of your elbow is exposed, and sketches down the digits of a phone number. 

“Text me when you get out of here, eh?” she winks, cackling again. You’re left to stare at her with wide eyes as the nurse wheels you away, smirking and shaking her head at you all the way until you’re being discharged with a fresh white cast and a pair of crutches, waiting for Sollux to pick you up. When he does pull up next the curb, you slide into the passenger side of his old Buick and stare blankly out the windshield, still trying to process what occurred as you mumbled a half-assed greeting. Dissatisfied, your room-mate and long-time best friend stares at you through his ridiculous red-blue glasses with his mismatched eyes, demanding a response as to what the fuck happened in there to make you so disoriented, did you swipe a bottle of Oxycodone and if you did, can I have some?

You laugh, because the last thing you had expected to happen when you went to the E.R. on a Tuesday night was to get a girl’s number.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on a true story. I was stuck in the Emergency Room from 10:30PM-5:00AM for a torn ligament in my left leg and a broken left ankle after falling on black ice out of work last Tuesday. And yes, the hospital was very shittily staffed (they stood around gossiping) and didn't give me a single ice pack until I asked repeatedly, considering I had a broken ankle. Also, they put me in the pediatrics ward. I'm 18. 
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed some inspired-by-my-shitty-experiences Karezi fluff. I wish I had gotten someones number out of the ordeal. Count your blessings, Karkat.


End file.
